Unfortunately my annual trip to Microsoft’s MVP summit was cut short this year due to some client obligations. But hey, gotta pay the bills. While I’m sitting in one of SEATAC’s airport lounges, I decided it would be a good time to get a blog post up. However, I’ve just spent two days listening to material that I can’t quite share with you yet. So, I thought I might give you a “state of the union”, if you will, from the perspective of a lowly MVP.

It’s been a long couple of years for Windows developers. Most of the Windows developers that I know have hunkered (yep, I’m from Texas) down in their projects using existing techs like WPF to weather the storm. There was very little interest, if any really, in learning about WinRT apps in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Enterprise interest? Forget about it. No one was really paying attention and the proof was everywhere. Long running popular blogs dried up over night, you were pretty much guaranteed to have the lowest session attendance at a conference if you gave a WinRT talk, and talks of WinRT projects practically didn’t exist. Heck the Windows 8 developer booth at TechED the year of the release was a ghost town (longest booth duty I’ve ever had to do).

Now to be honest, I liked Windows 8. I even liked the Start Screen. With live tiles, it gave me a great way to organize my apps and I never really saw why we needed a button on the screen when my Windows button on the keyboard worked perfectly well. To this day, my daughter won’t let me upgrade her computer because she likes the UI better the Windows 10. But maybe she get’s her stubbornness from her mother (not hardly, but this is my blog so we will pretend for the moment).

Here at the end of 2015, Windows 8 is now the past and Windows 10 is here. Since the insider program cranked up early this year I have been keeping a close eye on the OS and the development experience. Sure, there has been some growing pains along the way, which is probably a good reason not to run early bits on your daily machine (not that I know from experience or anything). Windows 10 is great. I think it blends the best of Windows 7 and Windows 8, and the performance has been there. That doesn’t even consider the monumental task of bringing all of Microsoft’s platforms under the same OS. On that feat alone, the team gets my admiration.

But my state of the union is not about the OS, it’s about Windows apps. Or UWP apps, or universal Windows apps, or any of the half of dozen names that have been thrown around over the last year. I’ve seen Microsoft’s official naming even change a couple of times. Regardless of the name, UWP apps are nothing more than the next generation of WinRT apps. In fact, most of the runtime errors you get from a UWP app still reference WinRT. However I digress, the question remains, are UWP apps worth looking into for your future projects…

The Good…

In spite of being fairly worn out, I’m in a good mood so let’s start with the good news first. UWP apps offer a lot for developers. For developers writing consumer apps, the store is a great way to get your app out there. Now the store experience isn’t perfect, but for indie developers to small shops to fortune 100 companies, you can’t beat the ease of deploying to your potential customers using the store.

Remember we are running on a single platform now (or will be over the next several months as other platforms roll out Windows 10)? That also means a single store. Now you are able to write a single app and deliver to users whether they are running on a desktop, tablet, phone, Xbox One, or even an IoT device. The potentials are limitless.

The language support is really solid. XAML dev? HTML/Javascript dev? IOS dev? You can use those skills to build native UWP apps to run across all of those same platforms discussed earlier. Microsoft is making a solid effort to open up UWP apps to as many developers as possible.

If you have been around my blog long enough, you know that I am a Silverlight guy. And yes, there was a toast to Silverlight again this year at the Summit. One of the things that came over to UWP from Silverlight is concept of sand boxing. While it’s not always perfect, I like the security and control as a user that I have over apps installed on my system. I like not having to worry about a UWP app causing any trouble on my system. Each UWP exist in their own little world. They can’t start adding a ton of registry entries, install random DLLs in my Windows or System directory, and they for sure aren’t going to drop a trojan in some remote part of my file system. While sand boxing might not be perfect for every app, I would argue that it works for the large majority of apps out there.

The Bad…

I could probably nit pick this section to death, but the majority of items that would end up here all come from the same cause: UWP/WinRT is still young. When the team started on WinRT they had an interesting situation that doesn’t happen all that often. This was a brand new type of application and as such, there was no need for backwards compatibility. Now think about that. Even if you have never written an API or SDK, think about the projects you have written. In most cases, your apps have to always support existing functionality. Even if it would be better to start from scratch, you still have users who expect and demand that the way they have always done something still work with your latest and greatest code. This puts a lot of limitations on what developers are able to accomplish. When looking at that same demand from a SDK perspective, the constraints are magnified by an order of magnitude.

WinRT apps didn’t have those constraints. The WinRT team had a clean slate. This lead to things like a reorg of long existing namespaces, new methodologies like async calls, and removing legacy code that no longer made sense. However, this also meant that restructuring and rewriting of code was a ton of work and left a ton of decisions to be made about what was and wasn’t a necessity. Alas, there were a lot of things that were simply left off of the table. XAML features that were available in WPF and Silverlight were found missing in WinRT. .NET features like reflection were stripped down versions of their predecessors. There were just plenty of things that were missing whether intentionally or the team just didn’t get around to it.

Jump ahead to UWP and where are we at? Well, performance is the key difference between UWP and WinRT. Teams inside of Microsoft decided to eat their own dog food and started building UWP apps for Windows 10 and other products and thus there was a lot of pressure on the UWP team to make sure that the existing WinRT SDK worked well. Of course, this left little room for new features. Don’t get me wrong, there were some much needed additions to the platform, the introduction of new controls, and a decent job of merging the controls/code base for Windows Phone and Windows. It’s just with all of these requirements, you didn’t really see the maturity jump in the platform you would of expected in it’s second major release (or at least I didn’t). As with all things though, it comes down to a factor of time and money.

The Ugly…

Now, I’m going to try my best to not get on a soap box here, but there is one aspect of UWP apps that still rubs me the wrong way. The deployment story for UWP apps leaves a lot to be desired. True, it’s an improvement over the WinRT story, but so far I have been disappointed in the UWP deployment story. If you want to build an app, put it in the store, and let users install it on their machines, then it works just fine. Sure, from a store dashboard and reporting standpoint things could get better, but overall it works. What happens if you are in an enterprise? Well, if it’s large enough then you probably already have a MDM solution that you can use to manage apps. This is a great solution, especially for IT departments with a huge demand on their time and resources.

What if you are running a 15 man shop? MDM is overkill and is costly. In fact, WinRT was the first time in Windows history that it cost to install a Windows app (or application) onto a device. That had simply never been the case before. Thankfully, Windows 10 no longer has the side load licensing restrictions that Windows 8 had (I’d still love to hear why someone thought that was a good idea). However, sideloading apps onto a Windows 10 device is still more trouble than it is worth in a lot of cases. In my opinion, until this story changes, developers will always look at UWP through skeptical eyes.

The Future…

So where does that leave us? We aren’t where I thought we would be by now, but different priorities prevailed and the results were all positive gains, if just not where I would of liked them to be. But is it enough to warrant me to tell you to embrace UWP apps?

Well I can tell you that I made my way to Redmond a little skeptical this year. Then I sat through two days (wish it was four) of sessions from different members of different teams within Windows. And while I might still be a little skeptical, these are my impressions of the future…

Number one, the teams are listening. Every person that presented, every person that I met, all had the same goal, they wanted to hear our feedback and our thoughts and opinions on the present and the future. They cared, because they understand who their user base is. That is the developer out there trying to create amazing experiences for their users. With very little exceptions, they seem to have a good grasp on our pain points and the things we wished were improved.

Does this mean that UWP is going to be the most amazing platform tomorrow, next week, or next month? Not really. But I truly feel that it is on the right path. And while I’m sure things won’t move as fast as we all would like, they are moving in the right direction.

I’m excited to see what the various teams release over the next several updates to Windows 10. The next year should be interesting and I for one am starting to get more excited about UWP apps and their future.

State of the Union

So what is the state of Windows apps, from a developer who isn’t in any authority to give one?

Windows apps will be just fine. They are young and as such have the same pain points any young tech has. But there is a solid team behind the product that really cares about getting it right and are working hard to provide a platform that we developers will be proud of. Now that doesn’t mean we will ever stop complaining about things (do we even know how to do that?), but it does mean that there will be solid platform in which to build and deliver amazing apps.

So here is the million dollar question: how do I know? The answer to that is simple. I have known several of these people for many years now and I know their character. These are developers, leads, and PMs, that take pride in their work and many have come from the “outside” world that we live in. They want to make a platform that not only performs well, but let’s us build apps that work the way we need them to work.

To wrap it up, the state of Windows apps is good and I’m excited about what the future will bring. And what ever the future brings, I’m sure it will be an interesting ride…